The building
Opened 2003
From the street the centre looks like a great grey drum with a curved wall of glass sliced into it, eleven floors tall, with the letters NTSEC on its flank and banners for the current exhibitions. It is one of a cluster of public buildings in Shilin that were planned together in the nineteen nineties, with the Astronomical Museum and its dome to one side and the Children's Amusement Park with its ferris wheel behind. The building was completed in 2003, when the centre moved here from its old home in the city centre, and it was designed to be an exhibit in itself: a shell around a single tall void.
Step inside and the drum turns out to be hollow. An atrium runs the full height of the building, ringed by balconies, so that you can stand in the lobby and see the exhibition floors stacked above you, the escalators cutting across, and high overhead the cable of the Air Bicycle. The architects used exposed steel, ducts and glass rather than hiding them, so that the structure is part of the lesson. Look for the way the floors step back as they rise and the way natural light from the curved facade reaches the lower levels.
The centre's story is older than its building. It was founded in 1956 and for decades occupied a striking round hall in the Nanhai Academy near the Botanical Garden, with a green tiled roof modelled on the Temple of Heaven in Beijing; that building still stands and is now used for other purposes. The move north to Shilin gave the institution ten times the space and a site among parks and museums, and it now receives several million visitors a year, most of them children.
Did You Know? The centre's first home, a round hall with a green tiled roof modelled on the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, still stands near the Taipei Botanical Garden.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.